History of Hungary

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1956 Olympic Games: Blood in the Water

Held in Melbourne, Australia, in 1956, the 16th Olympiad coincided with one of the signal events of Cold War history: the Soviet army’s repression of an uprising in Hungary against the pro-Soviet government there. Thousands of Hungarians were killed during the incident, and in the following months 200,000 Hungarians fled their country, most to the United States and western Europe.

major treatment

1956 uprising

...the end of the one-party state and to release the Roman Catholic primate József Cardinal Mindszenty from his long imprisonment. Nagy also promised freedom of speech and the withdrawal of Hungary from the Warsaw Pact. While Hungary’s fate hung in the balance, the Western powers had their attention diverted by a second Middle Eastern war.

19th-century Europe

...German bureaucracy to replace the defunct manorial regime and in the 1860s sought to make peace with the leading nationalist movement. In the
Ausgleich (“compromise”) of 1867, Hungary was granted substantial autonomy, and separate parliaments, though based on limited suffrage, were established in Austria and Hungary. This result enraged Slavic nationalists, but it signaled...

Arrow Cross Party

Hungarian fascist organization that controlled the Hungarian government from October 1944 to April 1945 during World War II. It originated as the Party of National Will founded by Ferenc Szálasi in 1935. Szálasi’s party was quite small and underwent numerous reorganizations; it reconstituted itself under a new name and emerged early in 1939 as the Arrow Cross Party. In the May...

Austria-Hungary

...that the constitutional reorganization of the Habsburg monarchy, under discussion since 1859, be brought to an early and successful conclusion. Personnel changes facilitated the solution of the Hungarian crisis. Friedrich Ferdinand, Freiherr (baron) von Beust (later Graf [count] von Beust), who had been prime minister of Saxony, took charge of Habsburg affairs, first as foreign minister...

Balkans

...no more apparent among the Catholic Balkan Christians than among the Orthodox. The Croats established their own kingdom in the 10th century under Tomislav but in 1102 agreed to become part of the Hungarian monarchy. In the 14th century there was a short-lived Bosnian kingdom under the Kotromanić dynasty, but it also joined Hungary—even though Bosnia was less Catholic in its...

Communist takeover

In Hungary the 1944 coalition included only two communist ministers, and in the 1945 election the moderate-liberal Smallholders’ Party led the poll. The communists threatened to quit the government, leaving it as a minority, unless they were given the Ministry of the Interior. They organized demonstrations and insisted on the dismissal of 22 Smallholders’ representatives. In December 1946 the...

...The U.S.S.R. compelled the King of Romania to appoint a Communist-dominated government, Tito’s Communists assumed control of a coalition with royalists in Yugoslavia, Communists dominated in Hungary and Bulgaria (where a reported 20,000 people were liquidated), and the Red Army extended an invitation to “consult” with 16 underground Polish leaders only to arrest them when...

early modern Europe

Poland, Lithuania, Bohemia, and Hungary were all loosely associated at the close of the 15th century under rulers of the Jagiellon dynasty. In 1569, three years before the death of the last Jagiellon king of Lithuania-Poland, these two countries merged their separate institutions by the Union of Lublin. Thereafter the Polish nobility and the Roman Catholic faith dominated the Orthodox lands of...

Golden Bull of 1222

charter granted by King Andrew II of Hungary, which stated the basic rights and privileges of the Hungarian nobility and clergymen and the limits of the monarch’s powers. The Hungarian nobles, aroused by Andrew’s excesses and extravagances, forced him to promulgate the Golden Bull. It contained 31 articles, reaffirming previously granted rights and bestowing new ones.

Holocaust

The impact of the Holocaust varied from region to region, and from year to year in the 21 countries that were directly affected. Nowhere was the Holocaust more intense and sudden than in Hungary. What took place over several years in Germany occurred over 16 weeks in Hungary. Entering the war as a German ally, Hungary had persecuted its Jews but not permitted their deportation. After Germany...

Holy Roman Empire

...in size with smaller independent states elsewhere, such as Scotland or the Dutch Republic. At the top came the lands of the Austrian Habsburgs, covering the elective kingdoms of Bohemia and Hungary, as well as Austria, the Tyrol, and Alsace, with about 8,000,000 inhabitants; next came electoral Saxony, Brandenburg, and Bavaria, with more than 1,000,000 subjects each; and then the...

Italy

In 568–569 a different Germanic tribe, the Lombards, invaded Italy under their king, Alboin (
c. 565–572). They came from Pannonia (modern western Hungary), which had itself been a Roman province. Exactly how Romanized they were is a matter of dispute, but they certainly did not have the political coherence of the Ostrogoths, and they never conquered the whole of Italy. Alboin...

...but also unpopular; he spent much of the early part of his reign confined in his power base, Friuli. Even when he did not have internal rivals, as in 898–900, he was unlucky; in 899 the Hungarians invaded Italy, destroying Berengar’s army and initiating a series of raids that were to last, off and on, until the 950s.

liberalization

...free elections to be held on June 4, 1989, the first such in over 40 years. Solidarity initially won 160 of the 161 available seats and then took the remaining seat in a runoff election. On May 2, Hungary dismantled barriers on its border with Austria—the first real breach in the Iron Curtain.

Hungary became the second (after Poland) to seize its independence when the National Assembly, on October 18, amended its constitution to abolish the Socialist party’s “leading role” in society, legalize non-Communist political parties, and change the name of the country from the “People’s Republic” to simply the “Republic of Hungary.” East Germany, one of...

Magyar invasion

...The other branch spread southward and made contact with the Bulgar Turks and the Khazars; in 895 this branch (the Magyars [Hungarians]), together with certain Turkish tribes, conquered what is now Hungary. In this way, the largest, but at the same time linguistically the most isolated, Finno-Ugric nation came into existence. Other Magyars live in the countries of Romania and Slovakia.

Nagodba

1868, pact that governed Croatia’s political status as a territory of Hungary until the end of World War I. When the Ausgleich, or Compromise, of 1867 created the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy, Croatia, which was part of the Habsburg empire, was merged with Slavonia and placed under Hungarian jurisdiction. Although many Croats who sought full autonomy for the South Slavs of the empire objected...

National Communism

...liberalization of the Soviet regime that followed Stalin’s death in 1953 raised hopes for a parallel liberalization in eastern Europe. That year the liberal communist Imre Nagy took power in Hungary and instituted reforms that constituted a marked retreat from socialism. His National Communist program returned retail trade and craft industries to private enterprise, made possible the...

North Atlantic Treaty Organization

...Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Joining the original signatories were Greece and Turkey (1952); West Germany (1955; from 1990 as Germany); Spain (1982); the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland (1999); Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia (2004); and Albania and Croatia (2009). France withdrew from the integrated military command of NATO...

postwar boundary changes

...parties. Romania ceded northern Bukovina and Bessarabia back to the U.S.S.R., which also claimed Petsamo and the Karelian Isthmus from Finland and the Carpatho-Ukraine region from Czechoslovakia. Hungary returned northern Transylvania to Romania. Italy ceded the Dodecanese islands to Greece and surrendered its overseas colonies, although a Soviet demand for a trusteeship over Libya was...

Protestant Reformation

In Hungary, the Turkish victory at the Battle of Mohács in 1526 brought about a division of the land into three sections, with the northwest ruled by the Habsburg Ferdinand, the eastern province of Transylvania under Zápolya, and the area of Buda under the Turks. Even before this date Lutheran ideas had made slight inroads in the German and Magyar sections of Hungary. Although...

relations with

Austria

...a member of the house of Přemysl, married the widowed Margaret. Thereupon Hungarian forces intervened. Under the Treaty of Ofen (1254) Otakar was to rule Austria, while King Béla IV of Hungary received Steiermark. Troubles in Salzburg, stemming from a conflict between Bohemia and Hungary, inspired a rising among Steiermark’s nobles. Otakar intervened and in the Treaty of Vienna...

...and gained a decisive victory over the Turks in the Battle of Zenta (1697). After another offensive against Bosnia, the Turks finally decided to negotiate a peace. In the Treaty of Carlowitz (1699) Hungary, Transylvania, and large parts of Slavonia (now in Croatia) fell to the Habsburg emperor. Meanwhile, the war in the west, overshadowed already by the question of the Spanish succession, had...

...and both lords and peasants were apprehensive about what his agricultural changes would mean for their future. Moreover, a few other policies had inspired resistance. In 1784 he informed the Hungarian government that its official language, Latin, was not effective for modern government and, since Hungarian was spoken by only part of the population of that kingdom, that the language of...

In other parts of the monarchy, the revolution of 1848 passed quickly through a liberal-democratic to a national phase, and in no place was this more evident or more serious than in Hungary. Joseph II’s effort to incorporate Hungary more fully into the monarchy, along with the early 19th century’s rising national awareness throughout Europe, had a profound impact upon the aristocratic...

Bosnia and Herzegovina

...rule by Byzantium through Croatian or Serbian intermediaries, incorporation into a Serbian kingdom that had expanded northward from the territory of modern Montenegro and Herzegovina, rule by Hungary, and a brief period of renewed Byzantine rule. After the death of the emperor Manuel I Comnenus in 1180, Byzantine rule fell away, and government by Croatia or Hungary was not restored: a...

Byzantine Empire

...of paramount importance for the Byzantines. John II tried and failed to break what was becoming the Venetian monopoly of Byzantine trade, and he sought to come to terms with the new kingdom of Hungary, to whose ruler he was related by marriage. Alexius I had seen the importance of Hungary, lying between the Western and Byzantine empires, a neighbour of the Venetians and the Serbs. More...

Croatia

...kings until 1102, when the crown passed into the hands of the Hungarian dynasty. The precise terms of this relationship later became a matter of dispute. Nonetheless, even under dynastic union with Hungary, institutions of separate Croatian statehood were maintained through the Sabor (an assembly of Croatian nobles) and the ban (viceroy). In addition, the Croatian nobles retained their lands...

...monarchy collapsing, the peasantry in revolt, and the Serbian and Italian armies advancing toward Croatian territory, the Croatian Sabor voted in October 1918 to break relations with Austria-Hungary and declared the unification of the lands of Croatia, Dalmatia, and Slavonia in an independent Croatian state. Soon, however, the Sabor announced the incorporation of Croatia into a South...

Czech and Slovak peoples

...it. The Moravian state was destroyed in the first decade of the 10th century, and, after a period of disorder in the 11th century, Slovakia found itself incorporated as one of the lands of the Hungarian crown.

...to the Munich timetable, was not Czechoslovakia’s only territorial loss. Shortly after the Munich verdict, Poland sent troops to annex the Teschen region. By the Vienna Award (Nov. 2, 1938), Hungary was granted one-quarter of Slovak and Ruthenian territories. By all these amputations Czechoslovakia lost about one-third of its population, and the country was rendered defenseless.

eastern Europe

...Tories to avoid conciliating Lenin, while the general level of Allied anxiety had been raised by declaration of a Soviet republic in Bavaria and Béla Kun’s Communist coup d’état in Hungary on March 21. Kun immediately invaded Czechoslovakia and appealed to Lenin for help (which the Bolsheviks were in no condition to provide). On April 10 a Romanian army attacked Hungary, and...

The Treaty of Trianon, delayed until 1920 by the Communist coup in Hungary, partitioned that ancient kingdom among its neighbours. Transylvania, including its minority of 1,300,000 Magyars, passed to Romania. The Banat of Temesvár (Timişoara) was divided between Romania and Yugoslavia, Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia passed to Czechoslovakia, and Croatia to Yugoslavia. All told, Hungary’s...

To the north, Italian diplomacy aimed at countering French influence among the successor states. In 1920 the French even courted Hungary and toyed with the idea of resurrecting a Danubian Confederation, but when the deposed Habsburg King Charles appeared in Hungary in March 1921, Allied protests and a Czech ultimatum forced him back into exile. Hungarian revisionism, however, motivated...

Germany

Greater prestige still and a claim to imperial hegemony fell to the Saxon rulers when they broke the impetus of the Hungarian (Magyar) invasions, against which the military resources and methods of western European society had almost wholly failed for several decades. In 933, after long preparations, Henry routed a Hungarian attack on Saxony and Thuringia. In 955 Otto I (Otto the Great; reigned...

Mongols

...thrust into eastern Europe until the winter of 1236–37. The fall of Kiev in December 1240—with incalculable consequences for Russian history—was followed by a Mongol invasion of Hungary in 1241–42. Although victorious against the forces of King Béla IV, the Mongols evacuated Hungary and withdrew to southern and central Russia. Ruled by Batu (d.
c. 1255),...

Ottoman Empire

...to accept Ottoman suzerainty. The death of the Serbian emperor Stefan Dušan in 1355 left his successors too divided and weak to defeat the Ottomans, despite an alliance with Louis I of Hungary and Tsar Shishman of Bulgaria in the first European crusade against the Ottomans. The Byzantine emperor John V tried to mobilize European assistance by uniting the churches of Constantinople...

...of the common origin of Turkish, Mongol, Tungus, Finnish, Hungarian, and other languages; some of its advocates envisioned a great political federation of speakers of these languages, extending from Hungary eastward to the Pacific Ocean.

Poland

...pursuit of the latter was opposed by one of the minor dukes, Władysław the Short, who had earlier battled the two Wenceslases and their supporters. Allying himself with the new king of Hungary, Charles I, Władysław withstood the enmity of Bohemia, the Teutonic Knights, rival Polish dukes, and the mainly German patriciate of Kraków. At one point the struggle...

...reign was a series of military victories (1579–81) over Ivan the Terrible of Russia. Yet it is likely that the king’s eastern policies were inspired by the ultimate goal of liberation of Hungary, which was not necessarily a Polish concern.

Romania

...voivodates, that they encountered there. In the 11th century they made the territory north of the Carpathians, which was to become known as Transylvania, a part of the Hungarian kingdom. To the south a number of small voivodates coalesced by 1330 into the independent Romanian principality of Walachia, and to the east a second principality, Moldavia, achieved...

Russia

...which controlled the Baltic trade. Smolensk, Polotsk, and Pskov became increasingly involved in trade along western land routes, while Galicia and Volhynia established closer links with Poland and Hungary. The princes of these areas still contested the crown of the “grand prince of Kiev and all of Rus,” but the title became an empty one; when Andrew Bogolyubsky (Andrew I) of Suzdal...

Transcarpathia

...Carpathian Mountains, Transcarpathia was long isolated, both geographically and politically, from other ethnically Ukrainian lands. A domain of Kievan Rus, after 1015 Transcarpathia was absorbed by Hungary, of which it remained a part for almost a millennium. With Hungary, it came in the 16th–17th centuries under the Habsburg dynasty. After the Union of Uzhhorod in 1646, on terms similar...

...which allowed Germany’s annexation of a portion of western Czechoslovakia, in October 1938 Prague finally granted autonomy to Transcarpathia, officially renamed Carpatho-Ukraine. In November Hungary occupied a strip of territory including the Carpatho-Ukrainian capital of Uzhhorod, and the autonomous government transferred its seat to Khust. On March 15, 1939, the diet proclaimed the...

Transylvania

historic eastern European region, now in Romania. After forming part of Hungary in the 11th–16th centuries, it was an autonomous principality within the Ottoman Empire (16th–17th century) and then once again became part of Hungary at the end of the 17th century. It was incorporated into Romania in the first half of the 20th century. The region, whose name first appeared in written...

Ukraine

...domains of Kiev. Galicia-Volhynia reached its highest eminence under Roman’s son Danylo (Daniel Romanovich). New cities were founded, most importantly Lviv; trade—especially with Poland and Hungary, as well as Byzantium—brought considerable prosperity; and culture flourished, with marked new influences from the West. In 1253 Danylo (in a bid for aid from the West) even accepted...

role of

Bethlen

in full Gábor Iktári Bethlen, German Gabriel Bethlen Von Iktár Calvinist prince of Transylvania and briefly titular king of Hungary (August 1620 to December 1621), in opposition to the Catholic emperor Ferdinand II.

Francis Joseph

emperor of Austria (1848–1916) and king of Hungary (1867–1916), who divided his empire into the Dual Monarchy, in which Austria and Hungary coexisted as equal partners. In 1879 he formed an alliance with Prussian-led Germany, and in 1914 his ultimatum to Serbia led Austria and Germany into World War I.

Gorbachev

...in those countries collapsed like dominoes late that year, Gorbachev tacitly acquiesced in their fall. As democratically elected, noncommunist governments came to power in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia in late 1989–90, Gorbachev agreed to the phased withdrawal of Soviet troops from those countries. By the summer of 1990 he had agreed to the reunification of East...

House of Habsburg

...major titles. The imperial title at that time was, for practical purposes, hardly more than a glorification of the title of German king, and the German kingship was, like the Bohemian and the Hungarian, elective. If Habsburg was to succeed Habsburg as emperor continuously from Frederick’s death in 1493 to Charles VI’s accession in 1711, the principal reason was that the hereditary lands...

John the Fearless

...of government and warfare, though he was not given any post of responsibility. Even in 1396, at the age of 24, when he became leader of the Burgundian crusade against the Ottoman Turks in defense of Hungary, his leadership was only nominal. The actual conduct of the expedition, which ended in the disastrous defeat of the crusaders on the battlefield of Nicopolis and the capture of John by the...

Joseph II

...sooner than expected, Joseph raised an army of 250,000 men. Yet, despite careful preparations, the organization of this large army was weak. Revolutionary unrest in the Austrian Netherlands and Hungary grew in the belief that preoccupation with the war would prevent the Emperor from taking on the revolutionaries as well. Joseph spent several months with his army; but both his illness and...

Károlyi

Leopold I

...Turks were gradually forced into the defensive, especially after the military genius of Prince Eugene of Savoy appeared on the scene in 1696. In the Treaty of Carlowitz (1699), almost the whole of Hungary was freed from Turkish rule.

Manuel I Comnenus

...and forcing Renaud of Châtillon, prince of Antioch, and Baldwin III, king of Jerusalem, to recognize Byzantine suzerainty (1159). Manuel was also successful in his dealings with the Serbs and Hungarians. In 1167 Dalmatia, Croatia, and Bosnia were incorporated into the empire. Interfering in Hungarian dynastic struggles, he was rewarded when his candidate, Béla, was elected king in...

Maria Theresa

...and settled throughout the monarchy. Farmers came from western Europe for settlement in some of the more remote lands of the monarchy that had been badly depopulated, mainly in southern and eastern Hungary. Some important sectors of the economy, such as textiles and iron making, were freed from guild restrictions. And in 1775 the government created a customs union out of most of the crown lands...

Süleyman I

...Belgrade fell to him in 1521 and Rhodes, long under the rule of the Knights of St. John, in 1522–23. At Mohács, in August 1526, Süleyman broke the military strength of Hungary, the Hungarian king, Louis II, losing his life in the battle.

Teutonic Order

...(reigned 1210–39), the Teutonic knights had already begun transferring their main centre of activity from the Middle East to eastern Europe. The order’s first European enterprise started in Hungary in 1211, when King Andrew II invited a group of the Teutonic Knights to protect his Transylvanian borderland against the Cumans by colonizing it and by converting its people to Christianity....

William II

What began as an attempt to save Austria-Hungary from collapse, World War I was transformed into a world conflict by Germany. William, having encouraged the Austrians to adopt an uncompromising line, took fright when he found war impending but was not able to halt the implementation of the mobilization measures that he had allowed his generals to prepare. During the war, although nominally...

Treaty of Trianon

(1920), treaty concluding World War I and signed by representatives of Hungary on one side and the Allied Powers on the other. It was signed on June 4, 1920, at the Trianon Palace at Versailles, France.

Warsaw Pact era

...1955–July 1, 1991) treaty establishing a mutual-defense organization (Warsaw Treaty Organization) composed originally of the Soviet Union and Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. (Albania withdrew in 1968, and East Germany did so in 1990.) The treaty (which was renewed on April 26, 1985) provided for a unified military command and for the...

Wesselényi Conspiracy

(
c. 1664–71), group of Hungarians, organized by Ferenc Wesselényi, that unsuccessfully plotted to overthrow the Habsburg dynasty in Hungary; its efforts resulted in the establishment of an absolutist, repressive regime in Hungary.

World War II

...tried to establish its neutrality, but the Red Army occupied it anyway and set up a “Fatherland Front” in which Communists were predominant. When Soviet and Romanian troops invaded Hungary in October, Horthy tried to extract his country from the war. But the SS arranged his overthrow, and fighting continued until the fall of Budapest on Feb. 13, 1945. A foolish waste of troops...

...against Romania had been met. Romania was compelled to cede southern Dobruja to Bulgaria on August 21 (an act that was formalized in the Treaty of Craiova on September 7); but its negotiations with Hungary about Transylvania were broken off on August 23. Since, if war had broken out between Romania and Hungary, the U.S.S.R. might have intervened and won control over the oil wells, Hitler...

...threatening Iaşi on the Moldavian stretch of the river, the Carpathian Mountains were the only natural barrier remaining between the Red Army and the Hungarian Plain. German troops occupied Hungary on March 20, since Hitler suspected that the Hungarian regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, might not resist the Red Army to the utmost.

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